The Business of Fashion
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Intel Axed its Entire Smartwatch and Fitness-Tracker Group to Focus on Augmented Reality (CNBC)
"Intel has axed the division that worked on health wearables, including fitness trackers. The company has been slowly de-emphasising its own line of wearables for the past several years, and has not mentioned wearables on its earnings calls since 2014."
How Bots Bested the $1 Billion Sneaker Resale Industry (Forbes)
"Controversial computer programmes quickly perform constant iterations of tasks, from adding limited-release items to a cart to entering credit card information, thus bypassing slower, human customers and frustrating shoe sellers hoping to sell their products to real consumers."
Syte.ai, a Visual Search Startup Just for Fashion, Closes $8M Series A (TechCrunch)
"After a site integrates Syte.ai's search technology, users can hover their cursor over an item in a photo and automatically get results for similar products that are on sale. For publishers, including fashion blogs and magazines, Syte.ai displays items from a range of stores and price points to increase the chances that the user will click on at least one result."
"We're at the Onset of an Industrial Revolution:" The Rise of Robotics in Retail (Digiday)
"Over the past year, brands and retailers from Burberry to Kohl's to Adidas have announced plans to pick up the pace of production processes in order to fall in line closer with the fast fashion behemoths — like Zara, H&M and Uniqlo — that dominate the industry's growth."
It’s been a tough year for luxury e-commerce — but a crop of smaller marketplaces are beating the odds with a focus on emerging accessible luxury brands and a firmer grip on operating costs.
The nature of livestream transactions makes it hard to identify and weed out counterfeits and fakes despite growth of new technologies aimed at detecting infringement.
The extraordinary expectations placed on the technology have set it up for the inevitable comedown. But that’s when the real work of seeing whether it can be truly transformative begins.
Successful social media acquisitions require keeping both talent and technology in place. Neither is likely to happen in a deal for the Chinese app, writes Dave Lee.